If an e-mail is sent to an incorrect recipient, it can cause severe consequences to a firm including lost business and increased exposure to legal liability. Mistakes are typically severe because e-mail communications often cross firm boundaries.
Incorrect e-mail transmissions may occur for a number of reasons. For example, a high volume of e-mail communications may lead to shorter attention spans by personnel and less care being given to addressing e-mails. Further, e-mail applications, such as Microsoft Outlook™, for example, provide features that allow for instant “pinpoint” access to a cache of recently used addresses which “auto-complete” the e-mail address as it is being typed; however, these features may result in the auto-completion of an incorrect e-mail address. In addition, many firms have integrated customer relationship management (CRM) systems into their e-mail addressing systems. CRM systems typically have larger contact lists than individual e-mail contact lists, and thus, a greater frequency of mistakes may occur when a CRM system is used. Further, there may be an overlap of names between the external and internal addressing systems of a firm's e-mail system, and, when both addressing systems are accessible to a user, additional mistakes can occur. In addition, as the number of a firm's clients increases, the possibility of having similar or identical names such as “John Smith”, for example, likewise increases.
In an attempt to reduce the frequency of the above-discussed mistakes, previous e-mail systems automatically reminded users that they should review the recipients of an e-mail before transmitting it. However, these automatic warnings were often spurious as most e-mails are actually correctly addressed. As a result, in many cases, users quickly became “trained” to click through and ignore these ineffective warnings when sending e-mails and thus became less attuned to the possibility of an incorrectly addressed e-mail. In view of the foregoing issues, what are needed are more effective systems and processes for processing e-mail communications.